Population

Population

Sighting surveys in 1987 and 1989 generated an abundance estimate of more than 750,000 pilot whales in the central and northeastern North Atlantic (Buckland et al. 1993). There are estimated to be about 200,000 long-finned pilot whales in summer south of the Antarctic Convergence in the Southern Hemisphere and approximately 31,000 (CV = 0.27) in the western North Atlantic (Waring et al. 2006), but some of these are short-finned pilot whales. There is no information on global trends in abundance. There is little information on subpopulations within the species (Donovan et al. 1993).